QuoteProject
You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you’re like an immigrant to your own world. You don’t have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.
Shaun Tan
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote highlights the complexity of the world and our perception of it through art.

Shaun Tan's quote reflects on the challenges artists face in perceiving and representing reality. It suggests that even familiar objects, like a car, can seem foreign and bizarre when examined closely, illustrating how art can reveal the strangeness and beauty in the everyday world. The act of drawing becomes a journey of discovery, emphasizing that the unusual and confounding elements of life are ever-present, waiting to be explored through creativity.

Themes

ArtPerceptionCreativityWorldStrangeness

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about the role of art in society, one might use this quote to illustrate how creativity changes our perspective.

Similar quotes

It's a very good time for horror. This business certainly has changed, but there's still room for serious horror films. Look at 28 Days Later, that's not a tongue-in-cheek picture.
John CarpenterRead
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
Mary OliverRead
Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck.
John Stuart MillRead
Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.
Helen KellerRead
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Susan SontagRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.